The ninth Ontology Summit starts on Thursday, January 16 with the theme “Big Data and Semantic Web Meet Applied Ontology.” The event kicks off a three month series of weekly online meetings on Thursdays that feature presentations from expert panels and discussions with all of the participants. The series will culminate with a two day symposium on April 28-29 in Arlington VA. The sessions are free and open to all, including researchers, practitioners and students.

The first virtual meeting will be held 12:30-2:002:30 (EST) on Thursday, January 16 and will introduce the nine different topical tracks in the series, their goals and organizers. Audio connection is via phone (206-402-0100, 141184#) or Skype with a shared screen and participant chatroom. See the session page for more details.

This year’s Ontology Summit is an opportunity for building bridges between the Semantic Web, Linked Data, Big Data, and Applied Ontology communities. On the one hand, the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and Big Data communities can bring a wide array of real problems (such as performance and scalability challenges and the variety problem in Big Data) and technologies (automated reasoning tools) that can make use of ontologies. On the other hand, the Applied Ontology community can bring a large body of common reusable content (ontologies) and ontological analysis techniques. Identifying and overcoming ontology engineering bottlenecks is critical for all communities.